the American Friends Service Committee, and Cesar Chavez’s National Farm Workers Association. Although the wave of farm worker strikes ebbed in 1963 and 1964, they started up again even more powerfully after the bracero program was formally ended in 1965.
Historians and academics have taken the victory over the bracero program out of the hands of farm workers. The classic argument, summed up by Linda and Theo Majka, sociologists and early chroniclers of the United Farm Workers, attributes the defeat of Public Law 78 to the victorious liberalism of the “civil rights Congress,” the eighty-eighth, which passed the Civil Rights Act and also voted to end the program in 1964. That Congress, so the argument goes, acted in response to several years of educational work by farm worker supporters, especially members of the AFL-CIO and liberal religious groups, who had been thrust into a more powerful position in national politics by the civil rights movement. The scholar David Runsten points out, too, that the introduction of the cotton-harvesting machine undercut grower support of the bracero program nationally. In Texas, where braceros had primarily harvested cotton, the new machines rumbled through the fields, reducing the portion of the crop harvested by hand in 1964 to only 22 percent. Thus, by the time the bracero program was vulnerable, the Texas growers didn’t need it anymore. It was left to California’s politicians to defend the program, and they were not powerful enough alone to defeat their adversaries in one of the most liberal Congresses in U.S. history. Finally, as Kitty Calavita argues in Inside the State, the reforms initiated by Goldberg’s Labor Department in 1962 made braceros less useful to the growers; hence the growers were not so desperate to keep them.24
These arguments have some merit, but they all ignore the role that farm workers—both braceros and domestics—played in putting an end to Public Law 78. Goldberg’s reforms were not just a response to the educational activity of farm worker supporters, nor just a reflection of the strength of AFL-CIO and liberals in Congress and the Kennedy administration. They were also a direct concession to the farm worker movement, especially the wave of strikes in the California fields from 1959 to 1962. Most ominous for the future of Public Law 78 was the role that the braceros themselves were beginning to play in that resurgence. Braceros, it turned out, were not that different from other immigrant groups who had been brought to California to work in the fields. Like the others, the braceros initially were relatively inactive politically. It took some time for them to get acquainted with the territory, to feel comfortable enough to fight. Thus, in the mid-fifties they made only short, ineffective attempts to defend themselves and to unite with striking domestic workers. But by the late 1950s and early ’60s, they had begun to exercise what power they had. In Stockton, a bracero crew refused to get on a bus taking them to the fields when they figured out that they had been shorted on their checks; in Salinas braceros and locals struck together in the strawberry fields. Increasing numbers were running away from the camps and joining the ranks of undocumented workers outside any government control. As braceros began to take part in the emerging fight in the fields, especially in crops like Imperial Valley lettuce where they dominated production, growers started to have second thoughts about the program that had brought them here, and looked for ways to replace them.25
The increased rebelliousness of the braceros was bad enough, but the growing protests that the presence of the contracted workers provoked among the local farm workers was even worse. Ernesto Galarza and Chavez had begun to organize domestic workers around the demand that they be given their legal right to be hired before braceros. Clive Knowles was provoking walkouts on mixed crews in hopes that the strikes would be officially certified and the braceros removed from the fields. Even on the few occasions when braceros were brought in to break AWOC strikes, the use of bracero scabs tended to increase the commotion rather than end it. The locals sitting in front of the Dannenberg Ranch labor camp were just the latest and most impressive example of how braceros had intensified the battles of local workers. The Bracero Program, whose main purpose was to maximize control of the labor force, had now become a major focus of farm worker revolt.
That first unnamed bracero who climbed that fence, wiggled over the barbed wire, and jumped to the ground to join a strike of local farm workers was the beginning of the end of the bracero program. He deserves a place in U.S. history alongside Rosa Parks and the Montgomery bus boycotters of 1955, beside the four black college students who kicked off the student civil rights movement by sitting-in at a lunch counter in North Carolina in 1960, and beside the white students who ended the fifties by humiliating HUAC in San Francisco in 1959. The rousing cheers from his new comrades must have been matched by a collective shudder among the cops, the foremen in charge of the braceros, and any growers who happened to be present. Who could ignore this singular act of courage and political will? Braceros would not automatically remain forever the passive instruments of grower interests. If they saw an opportunity to fight, they might snatch it.
One lettuce grower who had been watching the farm worker movement closely and read it correctly was Bud Antle, a maverick in the Salinas and Imperial valleys. Right after the Imperial Valley strike, he concluded that Public Law 78 was doomed and therefore farm worker unionization was inevitable. He figured that a union he could work with was better than the kind of unionism that was sure to come, and when braceros and locals struck at a strawberry company in Salinas soon after the Imperial strike ended, Antle signed a contract with the Teamsters. His prescience earned him the hatred of the rest of the Salinas Valley and Imperial Valley lettuce growers, who were still determined to stop farm worker unionism entirely, independent of what happened to Public Law 78. Antle, who had also been the first to replace his relatively well-paid domestic shed workers with the low-paid braceros in the fields in the early fifties, once again proved to be way ahead of his competitors. They would turn to the Teamsters eight years later, after the UFW had won the first grape contracts, but by then it was too late.
Certainly, the strike wave of 1959–62, of which the Imperial Valley lettuce strike was the most significant single event, did not end Public Law 78 immediately, but given the slow pace at which legislation usually responds to social reality, it didn’t take long for the workers’ movement to have its effect. Senators Eugene McCarthy and George McGovern first introduced legislation to end the program in 1960. California’s Senator Claire Engle, visiting Mexico during the Imperial Valley strike in 1961, told Mexican legislators that largely because of the strike he did not expect the Bracero Program to be renewed again by the U.S. Congress.26 In 1963 the program barely got enough votes to continue. In 1964, it passed only after its proponents promised that this would be its last year. Even Time magazine in 1961 got the story better than the historians who now claim that “farm labor activity during the early 1960s was comparatively weak and ineffective.” At the end of its six-paragraph article on the Imperial Valley strike Time concluded, “With a foot in the ranchers’ gate, the unions are now hoping to kick the gate down.”27
Cesar Chavez was a minor player in the 1960–61 Imperial Valley strike. He had come to the valley as the executive director of Community Service Organization, the job he had taken after he left Oxnard. John Soria remembers seeing him at some of the picket lines and at the big rallies, quietly taking them in. But Chavez did more than that. He helped organize local Mexican Americans into what he called the Committee to Advance the Valley Economy. The group circulated a petition supporting the workers’ right to organize and issued leaflets detailing how much money the Imperial Valley was losing because braceros sent their wages back to Mexico. It also picketed the grower-sponsored Citizens to Save the Harvest when mostly wives and children of the growers made some widely publicized but ineffectual attempts to pack lettuce in the struck fields. Less than a year later, as strikes continued to batter California growers and formal labor organizing was in disarray, Chavez returned to the Imperial Valley for the CSO’s annual convention. He tried to convince the delegates, many of whom he had brought into politics, to commit CSO resources to organizing farm workers. When the delegates refused, he resigned, abruptly leaving the organization that he had been building for ten years. Bud Antle was not the only man in California to guess the shape of the future.
April
